PSYCHOANALYTIC GROUP
THEORY AND THERAPY
Essays in Honor of Saul Scheidlinger
edited by
SAUL TUTTMAN, M.D., Ph.D.
Monograph 7
AMERICAN GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY ASSOCIATION
MONOGRAPH SERIES
Series Consulting Editor: Bennett E. Roth, Ph.D.
INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITIES PRESS, INC.
Madison
Connecticut
Chapter 5
The Dilemma of Therapeutic Leadership: The
Leader Who Does Not Lead
E. JAMES ANTHONY, M.D.
In 1988, the American Group Psychotherapy Association invited me to deliver an address
in honor of Saul Scheidlinger. and I chose the topic of leadership. There were several reasons for
this. First. Scheidlinger himself (1982) had tackled this nebulous area and had brought in some
degree of clarity. He had left his essay open-ended as an encouragement to others. A second
reason for my selection stemmed from a piece of history and sentiment. Forty years ago, my
close colleague, friend, and mentor S. H. Foulkes was also invited to address the American
Group Psychotherapy Association on leadership, and had felt himself somewhat misunderstood
by his audience in New York. What becomes clear now in reading his presentation is his
sensitivity to the dilemma which he perceived as much more than a semantic issue. If I now bring
Bion into the picture as a third reason. it is because, like Foulkes, Ezriel, and others in Britain,
Bion did group work concomitantly with psychoanalysis. This meant that he came to the group
from an analytic situation in which he mainly listened and allowed things to happen rather than
causing them to happen. He followed in the wake of the patient's associations, shadowing the
process until the moment for insight arrived. It was not, therefore, unexpected that his handling of
the group situation had the same degree of indirectness. However, since the group situation is an
arena that is more in touch with immediate reality and realistic requirements, the question of
more control, more active leadership arises. Thus, the possibility of a dilemma is set up.
Toward the end of his essay, Scheidlinger (1982) quotes an old saying by Lao-tzu that a
leader is best when people barely know that he exists. It is not clear from the rest of the article
why the author selects this particular quotation since it is not quite in keeping with his general
views on therapeutic leadership. There is nothing to suggest that this degree of self-effacement is
appropriate or desirable in a therapeutic leader. There are other graceful qualities attributable to
the therapist that shine through Scheidlinger's writings, and they all glow with a positive light
stemming from a positive philosophy that values involvement as expressed in caring, helping,
sharing, enabling, and supporting. Basic to his work, the group therapist should provide a group
climate of support. The biographical sketch be Fenichel (1981) draws a portrait of Scheidlinger's
courage, reflecting his caring, calm, easefulness, helpfulness, vitality, and energy, all of which
have been cited in various profiles of leadership. He is clearly a “natural” leader who carries his
inherent and acquired leadership qualities into therapeutic groups and organizations in both of
which they served the same vital purpose. In the same biographical sketch (Fenichel, 1981),
Scheidlinger outlines five capacities that the “natural” leader tends to show. These are a capacity
to perceive shared themes, to know when to deal with the individual or the group, to be able to
attract the group's attention, to set the group at ease, and to exude a controllable amount of
“magical charm.” In short, the leader must be able to connect, discern, attract, facilitate, and
fascinate, none of which suggests self-effacement. In his listing of the therapist's functions
(Scheidlinger, 1982), the more managerial and benignly manipulative qualities emerge dealing
with structuring, encouraging, fostering, controlling, and intervening. the caring and acceptance
are, of course, also there.
As can be seen, the dilemma is not there and one would not expect it to be an issue. The
question that arises at this point is whether it is possible to be a good therapeutic leader, to
function with negative characteristics, and not be overwhelmed by ambiguity.
THE LEADER AS CONDUCTOR
The title that one gives the group therapist may or may not affect his mode of therapy, but
it will undoubtedly influence his frame of theory. The question that I am asking of the theorygenerating therapist is whether he is sensitive to the built-in dilemma confronting all therapists in
a therapeutic group. In turning to Foulkes (1964), I feel that he is, even though he is full of
hedging qualifications. For instance, he feels that the term leader is unsuitable because the
therapist does not act as a leader of a group “in the usual sense”. The ordinary meaning of the
term suggests someone who wishes to lead a group to a certain goal, which is, “in some respects”
the opposite of what a good group therapist. does who sets out to wean the group from its wishes
to be led. The group analyst does not “often” function as a leader “in the ordinary sense” and in
thus “refraining from leading, he shows up by default, as it were, what the group wants and
expects from a leader” (p. 54). Foulkes also appears to have underlying political objections to the
term leader which is understandable in the light of his own experiences in Germany. His
objection to “director” is that it is misleading “in a technical sense” in that the therapist is
“nondirective.” Similarly, I am sure that he would have objected to other “misleading” titles such
as “benign manipulator,” controller, and structurer. The term that he feels at home with and that I
inherited in my work is conductor, and the question immediately arises as to whether this
particular epithet is any less active: not according to the dictionary where the conductor is defined
as someone who guides, someone who collects fares or fees, and someone who leads a musical
ensemble. It is difficult not to think of the conductor of an orchestra as “active,” although
unsophisticated people have questioned whether the conductor is anything but a figurehead who
waves his baton in order to keep the orchestral group in time. Freud made use of archaeological
metaphors to describe the work of psychoanalysis, and Foulkes has used a musical metaphor to
illustrate the dynamics of groups. First of all, he points out that the conductor is primarily a
listener who tunes in on different wave lengths to pick up the specific emissions of different parts
of the ensemble. The two basic wavelengths to which he is attuned are, when translated into
psychoanalytic language, manifest and latent. In most situations. listening is relatively passive,
but in the musical or group therapeutic setting, the conductor is a very active listener. The
therapeutic leader listens actively with his “third ear” (Reik, 1948) for the latent aspects of what
is being said in the group.
One must admit that the therapeutic group is by no means an ordinary type of group, and,
in understanding the role of leadership, is very much governed by it’s own context. Foulkes
insists that the group therapist does not assume active leadership and is not concerned with
leading the group anywhere. He “defaults” on the group's expectations of his leadership. He
listens, he observes. he participates, and he helps to make easier the translation from latent to
manifest. This bifocal view of the group helps to explain some of the dilemmas we have been
discussing. The therapeutic leadership of the group is, at any one time, an amalgam of manifest
and latent leadership tendencies. We have here, therefore, two wavelengths of listening, two
levels of understanding, and two basic problems of leadership that gradually become
comprehensible during the course of the group.
The interaction between the manifest and latent life of the group resolves the crucial
dilemma to which the group is exposed from its beginning. At the latent level, the group shows a
craving for a father who is all-powerful and all-knowing, as the child does in the family. The
group demands that the leader be absolute. On the manifest level, the therapist receives this latent
projection, but, as Foulkes puts it, his therapeutic aim is “to spoil it.” He spoils it therapeutically,
tactfully and gradually, allowing for the fact that there is an immense, immature need for his
authority from the individual members. He accepts the position as leader “in order to be able to
liquidate it later on.'' It is clear that any form of authoritarian utterance or behavior would fixate
the group on the level of its unconscious demands. A therapist never “actively” assumes the
position of leadership, never acts upon it, but on the other hand, never denies it “by word or
deed.” As Foulkes says, “he behaves in this respect very much in the same way as the
psychoanalyst does in the transference situation” (p. 611). In weaning the group from its
leadership wishes, two profound movements take place: a decrescendo whereby the group
dethrones the therapist from his “authoritarian pedestal” and brings him “down to earth” and a
crescendo which enables the group to replace the leader's authority by its own. In this way, the
infantile leader-centeredness gives place to group-centeredness. The therapist “behaves passively
and lets it happen.”
As the therapist accepts the idealizing transference in psychoanalysis, so the group
therapist is prepared to work with the projections of power and prestige that come his way from
the group. The manifest level needs the support of the latent level if the problems of the group are
to be addressed.
Without haying this basic authority at the back of him, the conductor might simply lose all prestige by
behaving as he does. The group might be bewildered and anxious, succumb to a hopeless feeling of
frustration, and interpret the conductor's reluctance simply as weakness and incompetence. In its despair, it
would look for another leader; not necessarily for another therapist, but worse still, would elevate somebody
sufficiently vociferous out of its own ranks into the position of leader. He, particularly if neurotic, could be
expected to abuse this position and certainly not to use it... for the benefit of the group. (Foulkes, 1964, p.
62)
Thus, without the sanction of the leader, the group at its start would lack the courage to
inaugurate the analytic process, to break new ground, to test values and accepted codes of
behavior.
In Lewinian terms, the Foulkes group is essentially democratic so that, in his view, the
therapeutic group provides not only a better way of life for the individual in the group but also for
the individual in the world. For the group to be prepared to accept the therapist deeply as a leader,
there must be some qualities that facilitate such transference reactions. The therapeutic leader
needs to be democratically oriented in his everyday life, reasonably secure and reality-prone, and
especially immune from any temptation to play God. For the psychoanalytic group therapist,
there should be a resolution of the oedipal conflict which enables him not to abuse power. The
analytic group therapist's aim is to create peers, and it is not surprising to learn how many expatients have become active in the field of group analytic psychotherapy. Foulkes was well aware
that the manifest qualities of leadership by no means told the whole story, and that the profiles
omitted the extraordinary underlying components related to charisma hat seemed to be inherent
or acquired very early in the life of the future therapist. This brought its own enchantments, and
so it might very well be that the group, even the most group-centered group, never quite
surrenders its adoration of the therapist, and this was evident in the case of Foulkes.
In brief, this point of view regards the need for leadership as a symptom of the group that
is curable only by a therapist who does lot lead.
OBSERVING CONDUCTION
Foulkes, with myself as cotherapist, ran an intensive closed group for about seven years,
and there was never any doubt, even when Foulkes was on vacation, who was the senior
therapist, since all questions from the group were directed to him. I was interested to learn how
he was able to command such regard and attention from the members over such a long period of
time. As a therapeutic leader, he was a master builder whose structural elaborations were carried
out so delicately and unobtrusively that the group was there acting coherently as a therapeutic
group without my being aware of how he had brought this about. His most salient capacity was in
being able to wait, almost interminably it seemed at times, and yet, you felt that he was always in
close touch with what was going on. He sat almost immobile. He came to life and spoke, always
questioningly and hesitantly, whenever the group pulled him into some ongoing conflict or
dissention. At such times, with characteristic indirection, he would attempt laboriously to find out
what was being asked of him. He appeared less comfortable than I imagined that he would be, but
I came to understand that this was in the nature of a creative tension that allowed him to work
along with the group inside his own head. As far as 1 can remember, he never interpreted sharply,
precisely, and concisely, and this was also true of him in the psychotherapeutic situation.
Together with the group, he would seem to fumble toward an understanding, somewhat in the
manner of a “negative capability” defined by the poet John Keats (1947) as “a capacity to endure
ambiguity, doubt, and mystery without an irritable reaching out for fact and reason” (p. 72). He
almost seemed to relish the ambiguity as a stimulus to further exploration.
When I was feeling negative toward him, I would wonder why he could not be more
positive, more active, more clarifying, and more authoritative, in fact someone who could
articulate the dynamics elegantly like a Kernberg. He had very little organizational and
structuring capacity and would fall over backwards to avoid any exercise of control. At his most
nebulous, I would wonder whether he had some trouble with the foreign language until I noted,
over and over again, that his role of a perplexed and somewhat confused person had the effect of
clarifying the thoughts of others and giving them the confidence to speak out. The group would
try to make something of him, irritated that he appeared to be making nothing of them. It was up
to them to carry him along as Aeneas carried his father, but for all the members, there seemed to
be an implicit belief that there would be no group worth speaking of without hint. At times. it
seemed as if they squeezed the inside out of him against his extraordinary reluctance to show and
tell. He never gave answers, only raised further questions.
I came to see him as a master builder whose special skill was in the construction of groupcentered groups. Once this was accomplished and the group was a growing concern, I could
detect his gratification at this unique piece of creativity.
Where, then, lay leader “enchantment?” As time went on, I saw him in his different roles
as therapeutic leader, organizational leader (in founding a society and institute), and ideational
leader whose theories began to come together in some form of system. As the group’s analytic
system evolved, he became surer in his approach and more of a guru with a demonstrable mode
of treatment. Even before beginning the first group session, his patients were aware that they
were in the presence of the international authority, and the weaning from therapeutic leadership
was therefore much more difficult.
On a more personal note, he displayed at times a curious needfulness that made the
members of the group, especially the women, want to fuss over him. It was quite a shift from his
meeting their needs. There was something parallel in the helper being helped to the leader who is
led. Helper and helped and leader and follower are somehow bound together in the group matrix.
Of charisma, often declared to be the prerequisite of all leaders, he seemed to have very
little. I saw him once in Zurich in the company of Moreno, and by contrast he seemed almost
startlingly uncharismatic. Certainly, he had nothing of the aura that Yablonskv (1976) attributed
to Moreno. “All attention focused on Dr. Moreno, who appeared suddenly from the wings like a
magician. He stood quietly in the center of the stage for several minutes, simply surveying the
group. He had a happy-omnipotent look on his beaming face ... although he stood silent on the
stage for two to three minutes, his presence seemed to produce emotional waves” (p. 8).
Although one could credit him with some charm, Foulkes was the very antithesis of this.
Had he exuded more grandiosity and self-importance, he might have infused more drama into his
therapy and produced followers with more extraordinary and unconventional approaches. I am
sure that there is a match between leaders and followers which can be discerned at national and
international meetings.
Perhaps there are positive and negative sides to charisma as reflected outwardly in
personality manifestations and inwardly in thought and ideation. I would believe, along with
Shils (1965), that there is a type of charisma that is embodied in some “very central feature of
man's existence” (p. 201). There is also some truth in the statement by Winer, Jobe, and Ferrono
(1984) that this central feature is derived from the two-layered nature of the charismatic leader's
appeal. “He is an identificatory model for activity where there is passivity in the present, and
more importantly, he is a model for activity where there is passivity in the unconscious fantasy.”
According to them, this is the reason why the leader requires followers. “As each follower
becomes like him, the leader repeats the reversal of passivity into activity” (p. 171). There is no
doubt that the therapeutic leader gets his momentum sometime in the past out of the resolution of
personal suffering and conflict. Through his active reversal of his own helpless situation in the
past, he not only repairs himself but gains the capacity to transform others (Winer et al. 1984). It
is further argued that there must be a very significant unconscious element in self representation
where he is passive, powerless, and “acted upon” by the object. 'The unconscious fantasy of
traumatization from the leader's past can be matched by patients drawn toward him with similar
unconscious passivity and powerlessness: these are crucial reversals from passive into active,
from helped into helpers, and from having done to into doer. The shift from passive to active is
probably then the essential element in the therapeutic group process. Much of this argument is
based on the “supernatural charm” but it does seem to me to apply to almost any use of
leadership. In all instances, leaders and followers can find themselves in the same psychological
situation, sharing the same unconscious fantasy and reenacting it in the group situation.
LEADERSHIP AND THE OBLITERATION OF THE
INDIVIDUAL
Bion is an even better example than Foulkes of a “gray eminence” in group
psychotherapy. Both of them discussed leadership on two levels, and both were inclined to
assume that other group theorists and therapists tended to work mainly on the upper level so that
their discussions of leadership were somewhat descriptively and optimistically tinged. It was true
that Redl (1942) had already referred to “basic assumptions long before Bion and “deep-seated
powers” but, for the most part, he was concerned with his “central person” behaving
patriarchally, tyrannically, lovingly, hatefully, agonizingly, seductively, heroically, and
influentially in good or bad ways. He appeared to be still fascinated by the “primal horde” and his
thinking is not much of an advance on Freud's group psychology. I know that the ten types have
made very little impact on me whereas I am still constantly struggling with the notions of Bion
and Foulkes. When I find myself. resonating sympathetically to their approaches, I have to
remind myself that I was brought up in the same group climate. The similarity is that one is
dealing with the same two levels, the interactions between them, and the primitive mechanisms at
work in the depths. In general, Bion was more provocative and eccentric than Foulkes. Having
experimented with leaderlessness, in the services, Bion seemed ready to try out some degree of
leaderlessness in a therapeutic group. Like Foulkes, he saw that the crucial struggle was between
the group's need for a leader and the therapist's reluctance to lead. He, too, is concerned with the
two levels of leadership, the one formulated by the leader at the level of full consciousness and
the other arising from the conscious, primitive wishes of the group members functioning at the
level of “basic assumptions.”
Bion's group is regarded by him as representing an interplay between individual needs,
group mentality, and the simple culture of leader and followers. Under certain conditions of
imbalance, such as a crisis, the neglected therapist is propelled into leadership. One of the
members manifested symptoms of madness, and instantaneously, “I found I had been readmitted
to the group. I was the good leader, mastered the situation, fully capable of dealing with a crisis
of this nature —in short, so outstandingly the right man for the job that it would have been a
presumption for any other member of the group to attempt to take any helpful initiative” (Bion,
1957, p. 56). The therapist became “the center of a cult in its full power ... a miniature
theocracy.” Bion points out that a group structure in which one member is a god cannot work as a
group. Under such conditions, the group becomes analogous to children in a playground with
problems typical of the latency child. While in the Foulkes group, the group's image of him as the
absolute leader only very gradually abates, in the Bion group, he sets out to wreck any such
projection from the very start with predictable reactions —indignation, discontent, resentment,
and a marked increased in tension. And what is more, the group is supposed to deal with its own
tensions without help from the therapist.
There is another interesting difference between Foulkes and Bion in the way in which
they articulate their own feelings and thoughts vis-a-vis the group's operations. Although both
these therapeutic leaders worked ambiguously and groped their ways toward understanding
themselves and the group, Bion is much more explicit in his intellectual and emotional
meanderings. For example, “I am aware of feeling uneasily that I am expected to do something ...
it may be argued that I provoke this situation, and it has to be admitted that this is quite possible,
although I do not think so. But even supposing my observations are correct, it may be wondered
what useful purpose is served in making them. Here I can only say 1 do not know if any useful
purpose is served in making them” (Bion, 1959, p. 31). And again,
I begin to feel as the conversation becomes more desultory, that I am again the focus of discontent.
'Without quite knowing why, I suggest that what the group really wants to know is my motives for being
present, and, since these have not been discovered, we are not satisfied with any substitutes ... in the tense
atmosphere prevailing, my own thoughts are not wholly reassuring. For one thing, I have recent members of
a group in which my exclusion had been openly advocated; for another, it is quite common for me to
experience a situation in which the group, while saying nothing, simply ignores my presence, and excludes
me from the discussion quite effectively as if I were not there…[34].
This time the group really is annoyed, and it is necessary to explain that they have every right to he.
It is perfectly clear that nobody ever explained to them what it meant to be in a group in which I was present
p. [36].
Once again, one is confronted with the two levels of leadership: the manifest or work
group leader and the latent or basic assumption leader. However, there is a difference: whereas
the Foulkes latent leader is godlike and therefore beyond comprehension, the Bion leader, at this
deeper level, is tinged with psychosis and apt to be irrational. As the leadership image undergoes
regression, his individuality loses distinctiveness and he can therefore become what the group
wants him to become. At this level, he is an “automaton'' and suffused by the emotions generated
by the primitive drives of the group. For both Foulkes and Bion, in a therapeutic group it is the
therapist who is the natural leader of the working group, even though he may abrogate this role
and, in both instances, he receives his backing from the underlying unconscious vitality of the
group.
The classic picture of the psychoanalyst is depicted by Freud as someone remote,
shadowy, neutral, and emotionally uninvolved, and it is this image that was carried by the
psychoanalyst into the group therapeutic situation. There was also a tendency on the part of the
group analyst with this heritage to behave as if he were in the analytic situation. Thus, he will be
prone to making individual interpretations and influencing the individual members of the group.
It is only too easy for the individual interpreter to become the leader, especially if the
interpretations have an impact on the group and generate feelings of uncanniness. Unless the
therapist has a good sense of the group and its potential, he will succumb to the individual
viewpoint and inevitably become the group leader in the most overt fashion.
Bion has pointed to the dangerousness of leadership, especially within the therapeutic
group. On the level of basic assumptions, the situation is a positive minefield in which the
therapist can succumb to the inveiglings of the group. Unless he is aware of himself, his
indistinctiveness will lead him to become what the group wants him to become, even if this
reaches messianic proportions.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEADERSHIP SELF-EFFACEMENT
It can be taken for granted that the group is ambivalent to leadership. It both wants it and
rejects it in ways not too dissimilar from that of the therapeutic leader. The group is ambivalent
toward the leader and the leader is ambivalent toward leadership. The leader may develop the
idea that the quality of leaderlessness related to a capacity for leadership that is not used may be
the essential factor that leads to success in group treatment. Another Lao-tzu aphorism indicating
that the best leader is the one who does not lead or who knows how to follow may generate a
very special type of group climate, loaded with doubt, unsureness, and tension. It is the climate
of. questioning and confusion in which therapy seems to flourish. The leader who withholds
leadership is potent in generating therapeutic curiosity, exploration, self-examination, and group
inquiry. The answers are located in the group not in the leader, and are rarely clear-cut. What
works for the therapeutic group may, however, be detrimental to other types of collective
organizations.
When Foulkes (1964) speaks of the group therapist as someone who submits his own
function completely to the interests of the group, ”he is essentially a Lao-tzu leader who keeps in
the background, follows the lead of the group, and lets the group speak in preference to himself.
As a member of the group, he is tolerant, receptive, and open to new experiences. Most of all, he
acts as a projective screen for all the feelings and fantasies of the group. As a gray eminence he
silently and passively and unobtrusively builds up an internal model of group functioning that is
insidiously imparted to the members and becomes a part of their vision. The inexplicable aspect
to all this is how the therapist does so much by doing so little, but by doing so little, he makes it
possible for the other members of the group to do much more. The startling insights and the
mutative interpretations derive from the group but the master builder has been at work to
construct a therapeutically active group.
Of the two psychologies, the follower is to some extent a mirror image of the leader in
reverse. The leader should he able to look into the mirror and see the follower, and the same is
true of the follower given the right conditions. It seems that not only are leader and follower
closely related to each other, but that they can also vary, the one with the other. The more the
personality lacks distinctiveness, the easier does alternation become.
Like all other human attributes, the quality of leadership starts in childhood and can be
observed in the nursery. The first observation to be made is that leadership and followership seem
interchangeable in toddlers. There are bullies of whom the nursery group are scared, but there are
also others who attract subgroups into their orbit for reasons that vary with the individual.
Erikson would refer to this type of protoleader as possessing “sending power”; it may in later
years be summarized under the rubric of. “popularity” and the attractiveness is not always on the
manifest level. There are some children who seem to have no overt drawing power and are
described by the teachers as modest, diffident, unpretentious, and vet eager to get things done,
tasks accomplished, without pushfulness or taking over the situation. These young ones seem
bent on harmony and will attempt to modulate extreme affects, or, when possession of a toy is at
stake, will mediate between rivals. On sociograms, other children often wish to sit by them or
choose them as friends, but for reasons which are not easy to discern, except for the fact that they
represent no threat to anyone. Teachers often describe them as self-effacing, but effective. They
certainly do not seem to be beset by counterphobias or reaction formations. They manifest no
Napoleonic strivings and no Machiavellian manipulativeness. For children they are “nice guys”
and for adults they are “decent kids.” The more sophisticated group observer, watching them in
operation, concludes that they are interpersonally competent and remarkably insightful for a
child. On further evaluation, it often transpires that their parents have run democratic
establishments in which conciliation and mediation are frequent and familiar processes. The
background and development is quite different from the controlling, asserting. and power-based
leader who can also emerge as a dominant force in children's groups, but whose term of office is
generally short lived.
In adolescence, these differing leadership and followership roles are consolidated and the
dynamics of this new development have been described by Erikson (1968).
But youth also makes an important step toward parenthood and adult responsibility in learning to
take leadership as well as to assume followership among peers and to develop what often amounts
to an astonishing foresight in the functions thus assumed. Such foresight can be, as it were, ahead
of the individual's overall maturity precisely because the prevailing ideology provides a
framework for an orientation in leadership. By the same token, the common “cause” permits
others to follow and to obey [and the leader himself to obey higher leaders] and thus to replace the
parent images set up in the infantile super-ego with the hierarchy of leader-images inhabiting the
available gallery of ideals—a process as typical for delinquent gangs as for any highly motivated
group. Where a youth can neither obey nor give orders, he must make due with an isolation which
can lead to malignant withdrawal, but which also, if he is lucky and gifted, will help him respond
to guiding voices who speak to him [as if they knew him] over the centuries, through books,
pictures, and music [p. 187].
I particularly wish to call attention to this type of individual who appears to belong neither
to leadership nor to followership roles and appears not to need one or the other. They are gifted
adolescents with heightened self-consciousness that makes it difficult for them to locate
themselves in categories, and who regard such labelling with uncertainty and dubiousness. For a
while, they isolate themselves (and this is not infrequent in the lives of group therapists) and are
able to learn from books and running brooks without absolute commitments. They emerge as
leaders who will not lead and followers who will not follow, but who remain open-minded and
flexible in both thinking and behaving. When the group pushes them needfully in the direction of
leadership, they develop followership characteristics and model the good follower who lends
body and strength to the group; and when the group pushes them in the direction of followership,
they begin to evince elements of leadership that are subtly attuned to the group in question.
Between the poles of leadership and followership, these individuals practice a modulation and
mediation that suggest an extraordinary capacity for compromise. Although they have not fixed
their propensities in the direction of leading or following, it is clear from their group behavior
that they have undertaken both roles in play or practice.
Play is where all life's roles begin. A common game of childhood, follow-my-leader,
requires appreciable degrees of modulation, mediation, and tact to be successful. After some
preliminary negotiation, a self-selected or group-selected child runs ahead, but followed in line
by the rest of the group. He will lead them into all kinds of hazardous and difficult situations and
the group must imitate him in every detail whether his behavior is hazardous, difficult, or
clownish. With every change of leadership, the tasks carried out become more and more
adventurous and the group tends to follow the more exciting type of leadership. In my own
childhood, I can recall a few glorious moments of leadership, but, for the most part, I was a
follower until I discovered the almost equal pleasure of being the tailman. I acquired a number of
insights from this group game: first, that it was just as exhilarating to be a follower as to be a
leader, although the tough work of generating new behaviors has to come from the leader;
second, that the tailman was tantamount to being a leader in reverse and completed the work of
the group since all group behaviors stopped with him. Without the followers, of course, there
would be no game at all and it was clear that the leaders needed their followers as much as the
followers needed their leaders. The tailman had a peculiar aura that drew others to this position.
There was a uniqueness about it that matched the leader's, and it was not uncommon for the
group to turn upon itself with the connivance of every follower and thereby transform the tailman
into the leader.
It was with such group games that I began my career in therapeutic leadership. There were
many other group games similar to this that informed me that any type of leadership that I
undertook would be based on my understanding of the tailman psychology. Thus, I would follow
the leader and the followers to complete and integrate the group organization; I would follow so
closely and tactfully that the group would hardly know of my existence: I would tail the group so
well that they would think that they did it all by themselves, and I would say so little that they
nicknamed me “dummy” because I was one who was habitually silent but only pretending to be
so: I might have all the cards in my hand! I eventually became so convinced that the tailman was
the crucial member of follow-my-leader that I began to refer to myself as the leader of the tail,
signifying perhaps that the best place for the leader to be was at the tail end of things; that is, the
position of the Lao-tzu leader. But can the tail wag the dog, or will the tail, under such
circumstances, become so powerful that it is the occult leader and practices leadership without
the responsibility of leadership? Are we again verging on a semantic quibble? But what can we
call a leader who will not lead?
THE THERAPEUTIC LEADER AS MEDIATOR
If one thinks of a continuum of therapeutic interventions ranging from the nondirective to the
directive, the process of mediation can belong to either pole. In this presentation, I am concerned
with the nondirective type of mediation and I would like to extend the concept of mediation to
include its more unconscious aspects. Psychoanalysts, such as Anna Freud, have placed the
psychotherapist in an intermediate position between the functioning of the ego, the superego, and
the id. For Erikson, the mediation includes the ego, the superego, the id, and the environment.
The mediator has all the characteristics of the psychotherapist. He is impartial and neutral and
reaches conclusions dispassionately. In the therapeutic group, the mediating process is even more
complex. He mediates between the different parts of the individual member and mediates
between different members in the group. The mediations are much quieter in tone and slower in
pace than in industrial negotiations. The mediator remains outside the conflict but is able to
present aspects of conflict to the different members of the group involved in it.
The difference between industrial mediations and the mediating process in therapeutic
groups is that the mediation does not have a specific goal that can be accomplished within a given
period of time, and the conflict is interpersonal and intrapersonal. The process continues between
members of the group and the group therapist, between members of the group and the outside
world, and between any group member and his own internal intrapsychic agencies. The group
becomes aware of mediation and not of leading, manipulating, and controlling. They become
aware of the mediating process that goes on inside themselves and between them and the other
group members. Each member becomes a mediator mirroring the therapist. The mediator not only
clarifies the dimensions of the conflict, but, with the help of the group, brings different points of
views to bear on it. The group perceives his job as clarifying and facilitating and is therefore less
ambivalent in its response to him. It is part of the mediator's skill to obliterate the more intrusive
parts of his personality, so that mediation does not become a power struggle between the
members and himself. The unconscious aspects of mediation are interpreted to the group and later
by the group, while the manifest aspects are clarified.
Thus I see mediation as a continuous process in group psychotherapy because I am
referring to both interpersonal and intrapersonal conflicts in which the members are helped to
recognize the dynamics that move them to come to terms with one another and accept reasonable
compromises.
Other group psychotherapists such as Pines (1988) have regarded mediation in group
psychotherapy as mainly episodic. At times, they point out, the mediating role can act negatively.
“Group members would put pressure on the conductor to be a leader and to be a mediator. It is
through his refusal of this role that conflict is generated and this sets in motion a process whereby
group members' capacity to contain and understand the dynamics of conflict occurs” (p. 58).
Pines also insists that the free-floating discussion of the analytic group, which reveals hidden
aspects of individual and group dynamics, is not relevant to the mediation situation, but here, I
feel, he is using the limiting notion of manifest mediation, and drawing conclusions from that. He
sees mediation as important in crisis situations in group therapy which borderline patients, with
negative mirroring responses, leading to head-on clashes. The group-as-a-whole then becomes
enmeshed in a disastrous situation in which the therapist has to function as a mediator. Before
mediation can bring conflict into the open and delineate its different parts, a phase of analysis is
required so that the members can understand the counted out parts of negotiations before
accepting them. At such times, in skillful therapeutic hands, mediation and analysis go hand in
hand as a group indicator without the more controlling and aggressive impingements of
leadership.
EPILOGUE
On one of my visits to London to see Foulkes, he took me for a walk to the Golders Green
Cemetery where the ashes of Freud lay surrounded by the burial urns of other leading
psychoanalysts, not all of whom had remained “classical!” I asked Foulkes what he thought about
having a similar pantheon for group psychotherapists, and he smiled with amusement and said
that this was not the group psychotherapist's way to solve group schisms. Conflicts needed to be
resolved for the living.
REFERENCES
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Erikson, F. H. (1968), Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton.
Fenichel, G. (1983), Interview of Saul Scheidlinger. Group, 7:47-56.
Foulkes, S. H. (1964), Therapeutic Group Analysis. New York: International Universities Press.
Keats, J. (1947), Letters, 3rd edition, ed. M. B. Forman. London: Macmillian.
Pines, M. (1988), Mediation papers: A group analytic response. Group Anal., 21/1: 57-59.
Redl, F. (1942), Group emotion and leadership. Psychiatry. 5:573-596.
Reik.T. (1948), Listening with the Third Ear. New York: Farrar, Straus & Co.
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